


we'll be the cure

by inwhispersandscreams



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:27:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inwhispersandscreams/pseuds/inwhispersandscreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She needed reality, but had no idea of how to grasp it. It was like reaching for shadows, but at least she need not be alone. Jefferson - the Hatter - he would help her, right? Had he not already done so before, freeing her from the asylum, opening the door and letting the light flood in? <em>He’ll help me, he has to help me.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	we'll be the cure

**Author's Note:**

> For [Julie](http://madbeauties.tumblr.com). 

It lingered in her skin, the madness, half formed memories of time spent believing the voices that whispered in her mind, the ghost of Lacey ever present. The two identities warred against one another inside her head; Belle, calm and logical, her mind lost somewhere within the pages of books where she had pressed her soul into the words so that she found herself a new home, and Lacey, a frightened bird, curling her limbs under and into herself to take up no room so she could sink into the shadows and cease to be real ( _they won’t find me here, not in the dark_ ). She hadn’t understood what she hid from when she’d rested in the shadows, clutching her legs to her chest, until the curse had broke, until the memories had rushed past whatever wall had held them from her and she realised that the _they_ was those who held her in the tower, who had kept her prisoner and let snide words slide past the wooden door to her ears. _They_ was Regina, and the man outside the door, was the man who brought her food and laughed at her request for a book. _If I just stay quiet, they won’t hurt me, won’t notice me. I’ll fade, fade, far far away, ghost slipping through the walls, into the shadows. No Lacey to exist to hear their words and bear their looks._

It tore her in two. Was she Lacey, was she Belle? She was neither, both, either. In one world, she had kept her chin high, drawn on the strength of the heroes in the books she read – _do the brave thing and bravery will follow, Belle, just do the brave thing_ – but in the other, she had skittered away, seeking to hide and fade. Was she a brave woman, or a coward? She was struck by the crisis of identity with every passing second, unsure whose eyes saw the world around her. Was she Lacey, or was she Belle? Would Lacey’s thoughts ever disappear into the shadows of time, falling through the cracks like Lacey herself had wanted to, or would she remain on the fringes of Belle’s mind forever more, an unwelcome reminder of the dark cloud that had swept over her home and broken the very fabric of their world?

The others never seemed to struggle with their identities, but then, Belle reasoned, they hadn’t had a piece of madness placed inside of them, a touch of insanity warping the world that they saw. They didn’t know what it felt like to see darkness in another’s eyes and quail at the thought of it, even if that darkness was only the slightest hint of brown. But Lacey did know, and now, thanks to her presence, so did Belle. _This isn’t how it should go,_ Belle thought, pulling her fingers away from tugging at her brown hair (that was Lacey’s habit, and it was slowly becoming hers, a habit of her body that existed outside of her control, and the thought was frightening). _This is my body, me. I shouldn’t have to fight to control it_.

There were no stories such as these in her books. No one had ever ended up at the end of the story but not known who they were. So how was it that the curse was broken, the story closing on the final chapters, and she still had so much to discover of herself? _But this is life_ , she reminded herself, _and a new world. The answers are not folded in neatly between two pages._ But how she wanted them to be.

She tried to ignore it. She tried to fight it. But in the end, the remnants of Lacey remained – a sudden waking in the middle of the night, a distrust of locked doors and a willingness to run whenever the opportunity was provided. Lacey was not Belle – she was too much a bird, flighty and scared, to reconcile with Belle’s own image of herself. She’d seldom been an adventurer, but she had lived to do the brave and good thing, something that Lacey would not do, not when she could run. The warring instincts clashed and her body was both the battleground and the victory prize. And when all her attempts to reclaim her self had lost, Belle neatly folded the paper in half and placed it in bin - and started again. Who, she reasoned, would also have this dilemma? She’d seldom seen other patients in the asylum that Regina had placed her in, and all members of the town seemed to be well adjusted. They fight the need to be lesser versions of themselves, but they didn’t war with madness. Except...

The pen hovered in mid air as the thought struck her, her head tilting slightly to the side as she took in the thought. The Mad Hatter - or was it Jefferson now? The thought of him in the Enchanted Forest was hazy, but grew more distinct as she focused in on it; she recalled his hat, the tapping of his fingers, the wink and smiles he’d given her when he’d ventured into Rumpelstiltskin’s estate and found himself resigned to the library as the Dark One talked business - or so he’d claimed. Sometimes that had been all that he’d seemed to want - just sit in library and while away the time until he was summoned again, but other times he’d been happy enough to speak to her, to tell her of the worlds describe in the books and more besides. He’d had a gift for that kind of thing, spinning stories out of air like a spider wove a web, and she’d listened - of _course_ she’d listened. In their true world, he’d been the Mad Hatter, but in this one, his eyes had been clear, and his name was Jefferson. Was it possible that he had undergone the exact opposite to her, receiving sanity instead madness as Regina’s gift in this new place?

If so, he knew her thoughts, her emotions, in a way, to struggle between seeing the world as it was and seeing it warped by something she couldn’t yet understand. She struggled to label the madness as anything negative - no, that wasn’t right, to call it as such - but it changed and distorted what she saw and felt in ways that Belle herself could not handle. She needed the consistency of reality, of knowing what she saw existed, and what she felt was real, that a cloud was a cloud and nothing more. She needed reality, but had no idea of how to grasp it. It was like reaching for shadows, but at least she need not be alone. Jefferson - the Hatter - he would help her, right? Had he not already done so before, freeing her from the asylum, opening the door and letting the light flood in? _He’ll help me, he has to help me._

It was easy to find his house, but she swallowed back the part of the Lacey that demanded she run and asked for directions. It was grand, and that Belle supposed was the small reward he received for being an ally to Rumpelstiltskin in his life previous. She hovered at the fence, fingers tracing over the wrought iron announcing the house’s location, fingers following the curve of the numbers _316_. _He has to help me_. If not, what else was she to do? Find every book about competing personalities, ask Jiminy Cricket about psychological disorders? It hurt to think about - there wasn’t anything _bad_ about Lacey, just that it was intolerable to have two minds competing for one body, when the two minds were as different as they were. _Do the brave thing, and bravery will follow._ This wasn’t even bravery, but she still needed the thought to move her legs into action and take her to the door of the large, imposing house. _Come on Lacey, we just need to learn how to live together now. It’s not so bad_. But it was, in a way. If Belle had her way, Lacey would cease to exist, and that, too, was a terrible thought. She knocked and waited, silence her answer. A deep breath inhaled, and then she did again, and again, until there was nothing to do but look for answers. White envelopes were scattered around the doormat, too many to simply be for a single day’s delivery. What if he had never returned to his home, once the curse had broke? “Hat- Jefferson?” she called out, hand hesitated on the handle to the door. _Do the brave thing, and bravery will follow_. This was brave, she could reason; this was her doing the brave thing for herself. This was her starting on the attempt of helping herself, even though a part of her demanded she leave at once. This was bravery.

And so she pulled on the handle.

The door swung open under her grasp, revealing a dimly lit corridor. Lights from other rooms illuminated the space, and a pair of shoes were haphazardly placed beside a row of neatly aligned shoes, but still only silence greeted her. Bending down to pick up the envelopes and placing them on a nearby surface, Belle closed the door behind her as she entered the house and hesitated. “Jefferson?” she called out again, and there was a quiet sound from somewhere above her, a scuffling sound and a dense thump. He _was_ here, upstairs, but... hiding away? It was the only explanation that made even a lick of sense to her.

And then there was the thought, blooming somewhere deep in her mind that brought terror with its birth - what if Jefferson was just as scared as she was by the sudden insanity that entered into their minds?

She took the steps two at a time when she moved upstairs, straining her ears to find source of the sound, opening doors at random until she found him, upstairs and pressed against the wall, head pressed against his knees and back bowed as if the weight of defeat was already crushing him. “Jefferson?” A timid little word spoken was just enough to turn his head to the side, for his eyes to slide to her in the doorway and his body to jerk away from the sound. “It’s... it’s...” What name did she use to introduce herself as? Who even _was_ she? The end of the sentence dangled expectantly, but Belle made no move to place another word at the end. She had no word for it, no name for herself, only a clash of thoughts and feelings that she thought Jefferson could salve, but found him to be as she was, struggling between the two.

“Are you all right?” She settled by his side, sitting on the floor and waiting for him to speak. Which was harder, she wondered - to suddenly take in madness, or to suddenly realise that you weren’t? _We all have our own curses_.

“I’ll never get her back, not now.”

_Her_. Hazy memories swirled within her mind, half remembered conversations that gradually became clearer in recollection. He’d spoken of worlds beyond hers, of lands where you were large or small depending upon the food eaten, where colour was bled from the day like a leech took in blood - and of a little girl, his daughter. The name escaped her, but it’d come back to her, slowly but surely, just as all the others would. She remembered the twist of his smile and the light in his eyes when he’d spoken of his daughter, the times he’d taken a book from the shelf and promised to return it, _after_ he’d let her peruse it. She’d played the meagerly hoarder in those moments, but always relented, so long as he returned the books back to her, and he always had.

“But our memories are back, Hatt- _Jefferson_. They’ll _have_ to give her back, _she’ll_ come back for you!” Belle told him, praying that the words were the truth. His face rose up from the cradle of his arms, a wild desperate light in them that focused in on her face.

“But I’m _mad_ again. It’s pushing against my head and I can’t ignore it; it’s _there_. Why would she want to return to me when I’m _mad_? I don’t even know if...”

She could complete the sentence by herself. He didn’t even know if this was real, if he could trust his mind. She knew, because she was _there_ , right along side him, both in body and in mind, not sure if she could trust herself. _We are the same_. Her hands grasped as his arms, the pressure of her grip insistent and firm. “Feel that? _I’m_ real.”

And so was he. He was warm under her grasp, and so achingly _solid_ , the antithesis to all the shadows in her mind. “I am real, and so are you, and when you begin to doubt that, just _reach out_ ,” she told him, “and grasp it. You are real, and so am I, and together we’re going to figure this out.”

“We...?” He blinked slowly, eyes seeming to refocus on her, on her face and her hands on his arms. “You were in the asylum, you were...”

She nodded. “We’re both mad, I suppose.”

His arm moved under her grasp, shifting until her hand came free and then linking his own into it, squeezing hard. “But real. You’re real. You’re the first real thing since...”

Belle smiled at him softly. “But I won’t be the last. We’ll figure out what’s real together.”

The pressure of his hand softened, but it never left hers as they sat there, each anchoring each other into reality.


End file.
